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kayfabe? in thunderdome??? also in you lily-white pissnards
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Jan 21, 2020 21:09
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:27 |
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writing about robots??? a strange departure for me but i'm in
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Feb 10, 2020 17:58
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in......without a flash  also 
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Mar 18, 2020 01:50
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https://thunderdome.cc/?story=8102
Djeser fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Mar 23, 2020 07:17
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Sitting Here posted:Management and me 
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Mar 30, 2020 16:23
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the following has been APPROVED BY THE HALL OF JUDGES to be posted before results to stem the rabid hordes of etc etc week 400 judge crits, or, sentenced to 45,000 words in an isocube ok here's the deal. i read the stories in reverse order. i thought this would be fine. i didn't realize that somehow this would fling me into the negative zone, but apparently everyone decided to structure their stories this week and reading it backwards made everything wacky and give me the opposite (but correct) opinions compared to my fellow judges entenzahn ego mid this is early to be getting on the Things Happen train but choo choo here we go. a lot of the tension here is meta-tension, tension we know about because of the context of the week. without that it's a lot of weird and some neat things thrown together like ten hours past due. but hey, you posted!  sebmojo the doppler effect mid "breadboarded together with zipties holding the parts together" hmm not much time for an edit pass i see. still this is the confident sort of noodling i'd expect though it feels crunched a little at the end, a bit of the old "ah hell, 200 words left" problem. if this had gotten another edit swing or two, seeded a bit more of what he was looking for in the beginning, would have bumped it up to high beefsupreme going down mid having a purple demon teddy bear eat both of your characters is a handy way to come in under word count. an amusing little tale with enough snap and cleverness to be enjoyable but there's a little too much gristle around some of the jokes. the one about the priority ranking particularly--move the action beat out of the way, and have it be a direct call and response. you can never make a joke too quick. anomalous blowout smooth one ex lax high dave is an excellent story and you did well to cop some of its successes. i like the combination of personal panic while the larger panic is happening, though perhaps as a consequence the larger panic was a bit...vague? the second-person perspective isn't worked into this as tightly as in dave, but the scolding feeling still works, i think. it's a bit pudgy in the middle, but hey, so is matt saddest rhino departures high despite the weird tense things that are either an artistic choice or "oops i forgot to edit everything into past tense" this whole thing manages to be weird and inexplicable in a way that's decidedly interesting instead of just Things Happen, so good work. even the jokey bits have weird punchlines. chairchucker tough on stains and accursed abominations mid the casual tone works well here though without a metanarrative to make sense of things it gets a bit odd. i mean, that's true for a lot of stories, but for some this week the 'point' is just to participate--which isn't bad! but i dunno if it's gonna stick in my brain once i've read like fifty other of these why did i agree to judge oh god curlingiron demon dearest mid this is pretty good but it's got that feeling that there's more, you know? like you had four hundred more words lurking behind the word count that wound up turned into a wubwubwub. not blaming you cause i'm guilty like that. also was a little surprised when comically disinterested mom turned out to be non-joke abusive mom but maybe i'm just momptimistic doctor eckhart voidwives mid this is a lot of Things Happening and in a different week i might sit here to parse out what the arc was but unfortunately i don't have that luxury. this story was fine, but could be tightened up in the beinning and given some more development at the end. i noticed a thing that happened where you'd say like, "she moved robotically" and then describe how her motions were robotic--you can drop the adverb and let the stiffness speak for itself hawklad last chance to advance high this one isn't fancy stuff, but the sense of increasing paranoia is good, and since the tone is relatively tongue-in-cheek throughout the To Serve Man ending feels appropriate. a well-executed story, and one that doesn't feel like you were cramming to get everything in at the end, which in this week is a relief slipup no evil mid this is doing somethin but i don't have the brainpower to process it at the moment, which is surprising cause i haven't even broken into the funny gummies yet. it's leaning a bit hard on the melodrama which is all right but it feels like it's missing the payoff. i know that things will loop once jonathon (which i have to assume is a marathon of jons) dies from the point that he sees his own corpse. what's the twist? what does he do different now? is there some revelation? cyclical stories are fine but you want the spiral to be pointing in a direction benny profane? i think? employee of the monad high basically the level of insanity i was hoping to see from these. the protag feels a little too savvy at the start (aside from the demon porn thing) to wind up succumbing to the corporate reward incentive stuff but i like how whole-heartedly he commits to it by the end. at this point i think "having a decent arc" and "not rushing at the end" are enough to propel people ahead of the curve this week antivehicular hanging fire high hmm at this point the employee stories have been pretty powerful, wonder if i'm headed toward the cream of the inhabitatnt crop soon. this is interestingly weird, it doesn't offer many answers to its own questions but gives the character their own conclusion to the arc--the one thing that might have made it a bit stronger imo is a better understanding of what her job is supposed to be doing--i get the sense of smoke signals but having some kind of "masquerade" explanation that is proven to be technically true/a lie of omission/only a fraction of the truth would have been interesting i think pththya-lyi your best self mid it occurred to me reading the part about the subscriber count that if you die you're still technically subscribed. the format is interesting--you might have been able to push that a little further, like with gibberish in the "corrupted" parts or whatever. i'm also not sure if the weird medieval vision she apparently had is supposed to be related to her doppelganger taking over. it's the sort of thing that my brain wants to tie together thematically but i don't see the connection and don't have time to investigate this week. oh well! anomalous amalgam new beginnings low oh no it looks like your pet thesaurus got into your story. and unfortunately that means i don't know what happened beneath all the words. there's this really tricky counter-intuitive thing that happens when you're talking about very abstract things where your prose has to be extremely concrete. like, i can imagine a dog walking over, i can see that. i don't know what it looks like when a tulpa desubstantiates and returns to the pleroma. this seems like it might be doing something neat but it's lost between the puzzle of trying to understand what it means in the first place yoruichi immaculate high this is interesting because unlike many stories this week this is actually less explicable as a shared-universe story than as a standalone story. it's good but it's just a weird gear shift from these things that have all been taking what's happening very literally compared to this where it's very metaphorical. it's hard to compare, like poetry in a week of narrative fiction thranguy void where prohibited high oh wow someone actually bothered to write about this conflict and make it cool and interesting and give it character. the weirdness is concrete enough that i still understand roughly what's going on, though i feel like there's something a bit more meaningful about the gun and the can. luckily understanding exactly the reference or whatever it was those were trying to do wasn't critical to enjoying the story. schneider heim what is home mid the character interaction here is fine, but i wish there was more oomph to the actual words. it's very matter of fact and you're getting a lot across through dialogue, but it might be stronger to see what you could tell through implication and voice. playing into the combo of fantasy and guitarist would be pretty neat applewhite neighborhood watch mid oh no i'm running out of things to say in these crits. this is decent. it's not super special but i do like the color descriptions. it would have been kinda neat and ironic if the emotion goggles wound up being a part of his optics in the end. aside from that the plot's fine, it's a decent parable about not being nosy dmboogie way down all the way down mid this is making some of the prior voidstricken weirdness make a bit more sense, so i guess you guys elected to choose a theme. the good thing is that here the theme is clear enough that i actually understand what's happening and the whole thing is structured around that theme. the bad thing is that aside from the theme it's mostly just...fine? it had the feeling of a story that should be more intense and emotional but keeps a casual detachment instead black griffon double dipping mid this has a similar feeling to anomalous amalgam's story in that it's a bunch of concepts floating around doing conceptual things, except this one i have a better sense of...sort of what's happening? but the issues with it are similar--there's a lot of abstract stuff happening here and it's hard to get a good sense of what's going on. in my mind's eye i was seeing a my little pony taking cartoon bites out of a skyscraper like it's made of cardboard. uranium phoenix radioactive potato snacks mid i can't say too much about this because it was clearly just about having fun more than anything and it looks like you succeeded there. but, i did think that at points the humor kind of clunks up against what's happening--not that i don't enjoy a well-placed "this line is comically long for the situation we're in" gag but i think once or twice you fall into the trap of pausing the story a little too long to make a joke, which calls more attention to the joke than you may want a friendly penguin level two mid this is definitely less egregious than whatever anom amalgam's was but it keeps hitting this same problem like black griffon's where there's Things that are Happening and have Meanings which are not the regular meanings of the words but i don't know what they actually mean. this is interesting. i like the imagery. i don't know what it's trying to say. tyrannosaurus every man would pray mid oh ho i see that this was intended to be the cipher for afp's. but not so much, it doesn't help me understand his that much more beyond a new perspective on the events. and here, in the more grounded version, it's a bit more interesting, though i can't say wherther it's that it's more relatable or whether it's more standalone or what. i guess it makes afp's more interesting but i read these in the wrong order so, whoops quoproquid eggshell high more well-executed than the emma story, whoever did that. i am rapidly losing my will to write crits. i wouldn't put this in win category but it's got a bit more punch and panache than the average so i felt bad sticking it in the middle sparksbloom the groomers mid the most well-executed of the Here Are A Bunch Of Terms That Mean Specific Things I Won't Quite Explain bunch. the emotional terrain wasn't entirely clear--it took me a moment to get the antagonism between the two characters, and again at the end, which made me think i was missing some tension that was supposed to be going on. tension that i struggled a bit with because i had trouble getting what exactly the stakes were because, see above thing about Terms. it's well-written, just hard to parse, especially when i'm so far in something else cleaning up high this one was pretty good though it takes some time for things to get to the point that they get largely interesting--but the unconcerned janitor who's cleaning up people is a neat vibe. adam vegas time jazz high a good little bottle story. ho ho ho you see what i did there. it's a joke. we like to have fun here, staggy mind the step high this is also a good time loop story. time loops: a good story device, maybe? who knows. it does feel at the end like maybe you were running short, or maybe i just missed whatever the ending line is supposed to imply beyond ohh cause the thing with the breathing on the self-help video so she's happy now? okay that tracks ceighk it's the poo poo mid-high i'm one paragraph in and i am desperately hoping for shorter sentences. oh no now i'm on the portents bit you can have longer sentences please just don't talk about pheromones. okay the part about the tagline was stumbly and awkward but now that i'm past it you seem to have hit a stride and i'm actually kinda vibing. okay yeah got to the end and it's a good ending. i'm squishing this between two categories because it's a messy start but i like where it ends up simply simon team spirit low one thing i see in these descriptions of action scenes is some weird order/tense stuff. if you're connecting two things with 'as' ('he ran as he fired behind him') they need to be simultaneous, not sequential ('he reloaded the gun as he fired into the crowd') and you can usually cut out words like 'started' or 'began to' or whatever--we know the action is starting because it's the first time you've mentioned it. using the voice of a drone like this is an interesting choice but i don't think it paid off, since it wound up dulling the action beats. it's not a bad idea honestly--if you want to read some robot fights i remember seeing some good stuff in uhhh accession? it's one of the iain m banks novels and all the human characters suck but there's some interesting like, nanosecond-level robot combat near the start that i was into the formatting thing is pretty neat though imo if you're going to do that, the next step would be to have a synchronicity between the columns, so like you could look from one to the other and see them lining up somehow. ptdseedly do one morning low hmm i'm not sure what to say about this. i get the feeling this was submitted so that you would technically have submitted something. in that case, congrats! ohterwise it's a little too sparse to say much about. a man is there and then he dies. there's hints of an internal lived experience but it doesn't color the prose or his actions enough to really connect with him before he goes all x_x armack whatever happened to the maintenance guy high this is very weird but i'm into it. put a funny smiley here like idk getin or the green guy. honestly i think this would not have worked as well for me if it was at the beginning instead of the end, but having a dbz love-verus-hate battle between a stuffed dog with a person head and a person with a stuffed dog head is exactly the inciting incident this week deserved. what a VoidWay to go. thanks for the laughs folks it's been a time
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Apr 12, 2020 06:02
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rat-born cock posted:
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Jun 16, 2020 04:09
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in 
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Jun 23, 2020 19:57
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you son of a bitch, i'm in
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Oct 13, 2020 09:59
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in no hell rule thank's 
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Nov 10, 2020 23:57
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https://thunderdome.cc/?story=9394
Djeser fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jan 10, 2021 |
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Nov 15, 2020 22:01
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in papa was a rodeo
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Dec 1, 2020 13:19
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https://thunderdome.cc/?story=9446
Djeser fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2020 08:46
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I'd like to turn the losertar question outward--is there anyone lurking who wants to participate but feels wary of the losertar? No need to justify why you feel that way and no judgement on my part, I'm just wondering what people outside of the Thunderdome Cabal feel about it.
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Dec 23, 2020 04:37
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Personal opinion on losertar: Having something at stake helps ensure that submissions meet a minimum standard of effort, but I think if people find the losertar onerous a loser-gang-tag (like a 'loser' version of a proper TD tag) might be a good middle ground between losertar and no losertar.
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Dec 23, 2020 04:38
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brotherly posted:Maybe make it easier to get the losertar removed? It's already customary that if you win, your losertar gets replaced, and I think extending that to entering three times without a loss (kind of like Antivehicular's offer) would also be a good custom to adopt, because that means when you get a losertar the way out is to simply write more. (My idea with a loser-tag was that it'd get replaced with the regular TD gang tag upon 'redemption', whatever form that might take.) (also in for one of them spicy rules)(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 23, 2020 17:33
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:27 |
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a friendly penguin posted:If we're looking to get more dabblers who would write a story on a lark, then I think what Sitting Here did for week 420 was perfect. Every once in a while having gimmick weeks where we go out of our way to invite posters from elsewhere on the forums to participate. During those weeks we might think about eliminating the loser avatar or the kayfabe if we think that will stop people from just enjoying the fun. But for regular weeks, keep this train going. Cross-forums promotion is p cool and I'm down for it whenever it happens, though it can be tricky to set up. Though honestly, having a full kayfabe week where we invite a bunch of people in might be fun too, kind of like letting people come to the theme park version of TD, where everything's played up but no one gets hurt.
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Dec 23, 2020 20:04
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